This was supposed to be an article about monetizing your life as an
amateur musician. It’s become an opinion piece on my experience of
Google AdSense.
Google
Adsense allows you receive revenue through placing content-specific
adverts on your website. The system makes Google around $8 Billion a year.
I signed up for Adsense several years ago. I had a travel blog which
was general only for family and friends. If I remember correctly, my
travel blog made me about £0.05 across 2 years or so.
Fast forward to 2011 and I am trying to investigate means of being a
little more business-like about my hobbies (mostly music). By the end of
January I had manned up and started to promote my blogs. I had created
several different blogs, which were contributed to by friends and
colleagues. I promoted these activities through Facebook and Twitter.
After a few weeks, I was looking at around 2,000 hits a month across all
my content sources. I was feeling pretty proud of myself. My Google
Adsense balance was approaching £10, and I hoped I could make around
£50-100 a year. Google then disabled my account.
When your Adsense account is disabled you receive a standard email
which tells you there has been "invalid activity". It directs you to a
help URL. The only response you can take is to make an appeal.
Taking the matter particularly seriously, I spent some time writing
the appeal which outlined my thoughts on the invalid activity. My guess
is that I have violated their "don’t click on your own ads" policy when
I’ve been proudly showing off my sites to friends and family. Since my
IP address is logged on Blogger etc. and my clicks are less than 1% of
the total hits received from countries far and wide, I assumed that they
would realise my site was genuine.
Friday, May 3, 2013
